Petrit Halilaj: Abetare (Noisy Classroom)

"For Abetare (Noisy Classroom) at kurimanzutto, I have taken this project back to its roots: the classroom. School desks sourced from Kosovo and the Balkans are introduced into the Abetare vocabulary as painterly surfaces, each table a color plane variegated by the students’ initial vandalism. Abetare is the ABCs, the alphabet book from which Albanian-speaking children take their first lessons. It was my own first encounter with language and the act of drawing though learning to write letters. The Abetare sculptures are an ongoing series based on the drawings and doodles of schoolchildren carved into their desks, their daydreams and small acts of rebellion that I transform into tridimensional, expansive spatial creations in bronze. Drawings in space, mainly of hearts and homes in various states of wishfulness and brokenness, frolic on, in and around the scratched and graffitied chromatic grounds. The sculptures and the desks create their own spatial logic: they play across the walls, the floors and the ceiling of the gallery. I have reimagined the classroom as a dreamscape." —Petrit Halilaj